THE END OF BOURGEOIS DEMOCRACY, THE RISE OF DIRECT DEMOCRACY – Mahir Konuk

An “Occidental” liberal fascist (K. Schwabs) in his speech in Davos, one of the headquarters of world piracy, declared to the workers of his own country and to all the peoples of the world the following: “We no longer even need to hold elections, because we can foresee and even know in advance what the results will be”. What a nerve! The proclamation of the absolute slavery that finance capital imposes on all humanity; moreover, the clarity with which he establishes the limits of the scope of a “destruction – annihilation” process that he promulgates has never before reached such a magnitude. The reason for the retreat of the “end of history” thesis, which is another expression of the same thing, on the part of the intellectual “cronies” of world capital, was none other than to prepare the passage of a genocidal attack directed against all humanity from the ideological to the practical plane of politics.

The above mentioned words of this “crony”, who is a liberal fascist in addition to his ideological and political position, can also be defined as an indicator of the complete arrogance of global capital against the working class world. But what drives capitalists and their “cronies” to such arrogance? Do they mean, as can be understood from the statement, “Working class, we are no longer afraid of you”? Or is that arrogance nothing more than a show of bluster that they try to display in order to subdue their fears? We believe that both assessments are fairly close to reality, but are far from a complete description of what is happening: “We’ve come to the end. We do not have a lot of margin for maneuver, nor do we have the possibility to exist through sharing. So, whether we like it or not, we cannot exist in any other way, we have no other path to follow and we have no other lies to tell.  Therefore, we have no other way out but to use our last trump card by accepting the truth that we know better than anyone else.”

If it were otherwise, that is to say, if it were possible to duly enjoy the possibility of “exploitation” while remaining within the narrow borders of “bourgeois democracy”, -which are not always permeable to the worker and the laborer or less permeable depending on the relation of forces in the class struggle-, it would not have been possible to bring the monopolization of capital to its current globalized dimension, nor would the national borders of its own “homeland”, the “nation-state”, have been blown up and capital transferred to its past “mortal enemies” (like China…). If globalized capital in its present form had another vision of the future in the “history of mankind” from which it could take advantage, in France, the country of both the “bourgeois-democratic revolution” of 1789 and the “Paris Commune” of 1871, which was an experience of “direct democracy”, it would not have put “a third-class globalist crony” (Macron), a self-proclaimed Jupiter god, in charge of “La République”, the temple of the French bourgeoisie; nor would it have allowed him to open the decayed doors of “Le Palais des Versailles”, symbol of the “counter-revolutionary” movement in the history of the country, several times forced by the revolutionaries, to “return to the past”. If it had the opportunity to act otherwise, it would not have tried to get a man it brought to power in Turkey through elections with “a handful of dollars for a tip” to dismantle a long-standing society, destroy the republic and install a “sharia-saltanate” state.

Why the end of “bourgeois democracies”?

As the “bourgeois democracy” is historically the replacement and reestablishment of a class domination led by “capital” through revolutions or other methods; the life of such a “democracy” is limited to the historical possibilities of the “capitalist system”, which is a form of class domination directly attached to society. In this sense, the destiny of capital and the destiny of “bourgeois democracy”, which expresses its political existence, is limited to the possibilities it can really have in the History of Humanity. This means that “bourgeois democracy” as a “political form” and the “capitalist system” as a social form, while being specific forms of the intervention of capital in the anthropological process which we call humanization in its own time and space, constitute eternal and unceasing forms of the general existence which we call “human society”. In the same way that “money”, which is defined in its general function of “exchange value”, was not invented in order for “capital” to acquire a supra-historical power…

The issue of “bourgeois democracy” as an object of research and reflection can be addressed and analyzed with the limited concepts and methods of “political science” and its “everyday” content, but when the question of the “end of bourgeois democracy” is posed with the objectivity it may contain, it will be seen that such an approach is insufficient. An excellent example of this can be seen in the works of the French scientist Emmanuel TODD, who is a bourgeois scientist “to the core”, who proudly vocifies his “bourgeoisie” of various origins to the “global cronies” and defends his bourgeoisie against “global capital” and other “supranational” institutions and elements (the Euro currency) which according to him threaten “French national independence”. E. TODD is a contemporary French scientist, a writer of world history well versed in anthropology, economics, political science, demography and other scientific fields, an heir to the tradition of the “Ecole des Annales,” which emphasizes “observation and evaluation over a long period of time”.[1]

We must remember that E. TODD is not a scientist “internally consistent” and “successful in his field”. In addition to providing a great deal of important information, concepts and data in various fields of science, he was also the one who announced the collapse of the USSR to the globalizing bourgeoisie in 1976.  TODD, in his capacity as a “demographer”, attempted to justify this “prophetic” statement on the basis of the phenomenon of “infant mortality”, which at that time reached high levels in the USSR, and explained the “October Revolution” by the fact that the type of “egalitarian communal family” prevailing in Russian society was decisive in the relations between individuals. We will soon delve into the veracity and falsity of this thesis of TODD, which has to do with social and political practice. However, here we need to note that TODD himself today regards the US – and indeed the entire West – as a “world power leader” that is collapsing for similar reasons.

 Besides all this, the “prophet” TODD argues that humanity has entered a process of transformation that goes beyond the “neolithic period”, using similar indicators (such as infant mortality) that he always uses as a demographer. Nonetheless, he does not propose a new social formation outside that determined by the capitalist system, nor a political institution that could replace “bourgeois democracy”, which is characterized by the “representative parliamentary system” in its various variants. For him, global capitalism is an “economistic” and “national independence-destroying” deviation from the “capitalist system,” which he believes is the only economic and social organization. To summarize, he is nothing more than an “individualist” and a “BCBG” (“clean and elegant family guy”) in French terminology, who cherishes the “nationalist bourgeoisie” and favors the continuation of “modernization”.

On the other hand, we must emphasize that, as an “auto-materialist” (Lenin) scientist, we have obtained invaluable information from E. TODD. The most important of all the things we have learned about the world of phenomena and concepts in his works is the current situation, which he describes as “defeat” or “disintegration” (La défaite) and which we define as “annihilation-destruction”. Finally, based on the data, we can say the following: The awakening of humanity to a new day, to a new society, to a new way of being, will certainly not be realized under the “capitalist mode of production” and its social system, its political prolongation, “bourgeois democracy”! So, let us now explain how we justify this statement.

Phenomena experienced in the economy

The existence of a “global capitalism” is not, as TODD claims, the result of an “economistic deviation” by politicians, but a result of the fact that capital has historically exhausted its capacity to socialize, that is, the capacity to realize itself, in the same way as other forms of production have done before it.[2] As a result of the shift of capital gradually abroad, the “nation-state” of France, which, as our anthropologist himself has pointed out on every occasion, has been a source of inspiration for all mankind, has been systematically destroyed by the political powers in the last 30-40 years. This is the most concrete example of the phenomenon of the “end of bourgeois democracy”, first the economic and then the political collapse. In fact, some French economists claim that the proportion of capital socialized through investment in production (variable capital) in the total capital of the country has fallen to 5%.

The disappearance of the socialization of capital and of the material conditions for the continuous reproduction of human existence[3] indicates that the conditions for anthropological destruction and extinction have also come to the foreground. Consequently, like in France, an “anthropological” and global phenomenon has appeared in Turkey as well, which determines everything: The processes of “individualization-socialization=humanization” and the equation formed by them, which were previously linked to each other with very close dialectical ties, have blown up because of an economic and socio-political system that has gone out of time-space. Since the political perspective of the entire world has changed with this phenomenon, the anthropological processes involved in it have also been redefined in accordance with the current situation.

The process of individuation and the question of the subject

With the discontinuation of socialization and even with its retreat to the past, a new type of individuals has emerged, who prove themselves one-sidedly participating in the function of eliminating the process of socialization, who over-individualize themselves at every step and who can become a subject-individual not even for themselves, but only for capital and the capitalist system. This Thatcherian neoliberal-postmodern individual, who has the freedom to exist only as “anti-society”, is the ideal subject of the “oligarchic” formation that replaces bourgeois democracy, and is the individual who gives up the right to be an individual for him or herself as a “deposit” to global capital in exchange for participation in the system. Since these individuals are not an individual for the society from which they have removed themselves, they have also removed themselves from being “an individual for humanity”. Nowadays, in addition to this type of individual, a totally new individual profile is gaining prominence, one that participates in the process of humanization through intervention in “social production”, which is the opposite process.

The socialization and its subject

The subject of socialization is the individual who, by participating in the continuous reproduction of human life, which cannot be possible without socialization, also becomes “the individual for oneself”. This kind of subject exhibits a background and a form of action very different from the crony subjects who constitute the mob that crushes each other to penetrate the system in order to maintain the capitalist system in a “vegetative state”, which has become a “black hole” in the era of globalization, spreading death. Being able to exist through his/her participation in the reproduction process of human life, he/she is also a “subject for humanity” or a subject of the humanization process…

Individuals who are subjects of socialization and/or humanization and who represent the future because of this position in time-space, and the “identity group” formed by them also constitute examples of the new forms of sociality of the future.[4] We were witness to its activity as a politicized social movement during the “June revolt” in Turkey and the “yellow vests movement” in France.

The “direct democracy” and the question of the subject of democracy

The “representative parliamentary democracy”, or “bourgeois democracy” in short, conceived a popular participation of the “working class people”, born of the revolutions and bearer of the process of sociality and humanization under various forms in time and space, and without this participation it lacked practical and theoretical political sense. Such political participation was, of course, a spontaneous consequence of participation in the continuous reproduction of human and social life. Nevertheless, since it included the bourgeoisie as responsible for the rules and their enforcement in favor of capital, it masked the reality of the direct relationship between the “real subject” (the worker) and the “social object” (democracy), a relationship that excluded the “bourgeoisie”, one of the parasites created by history. What we have quoted in the introduction is, in this case, an attack on the reality that the working class is the active “subject” of the phenomenon of “democracy”, which includes the “political participation” with which it is “existentially” linked, and which must be evaluated together with the phenomenon of the “deadlock” of current human labor.

The capitalist class, in all countries where global capital dominates, has long since practically put an end to the rule of the “elected ones”. The “crony” at the head of France has declared that the country, which he claims to rule by divine power, is a “Startup Nation”; his counterpart in Turkey, formed by an unelected group of the same type, arbitrarily takes over the government in disregard of the country’s founding laws. While Macron provides the police with armored military combat vehicles, the other one intends to create new prisons…

We call this new form of government that has been established on the ashes of bourgeois democracy liberal fascism: It is “liberal” because its rhetoric and action are the product of extreme individualistic neoliberal ideology; and it is “fascist” because it considers “others” as “nobodies” (Macron) and associates “strength” with being part of a “superior” race as a crony of this organization. At the same time, the fundamental objective of this group of “cronies”, which also has an oligarchic structure, is to wipe out the mass of billions of workers, whose sociality has been taken away from them and who are considered a burden.

In front of this new “genocidal” scenario that threatens all of humanity, what kind of new participatory social organization is urgently needed to replace the old one?” The answer to this question is given by the working masses who mobilize to recover their lost sociality and give a future to the “process of humanization” of which they are the historical bearers. The “yellow vest movement” and the “June” movement, which we have highlighted, have brought to the fore their inherent demand and practice of “direct democracy” through the creation of RICs (Citizens’ Initiative Referendums) in France and “Local Forums” in Turkey.

Apart from these concrete and extremely appropriate responses, the “false opposition”, which has the support of capital, which no longer has any historical function and which has no more historical function than dragging its feet in “bourgeois democracy” based on class alliance, and which has the “scientific” support of people like E. TODD, has also been put on the market to play the role of the fire department that throws water on the fire. For us, this group will be the most important obstacle for the process of direct democracy in the coming days.

[1] Here we will focus especially on the author’s following works; “Ou es sommes nous?” (2017) and “La Défaite de l’Occident”.

[2]  The tendency of capitalist income to decline – Marx.

[3] Understandably, what is at stake here is the fact that a historical process has become dominant.

[4] For more information, see our “Equilibrium and Revolution” study.